Scope, time, and cost management are at the heart of successful project management. This course will give you the tools to develop a project scope, schedule and budget and then status them to predict project performance. Throughout the course, you will learn about change management and techniques to implement it.
By the end of this course you will be able to:
• Create a requirements document
• Create a Project Scope Statement
• Identify ways to control the scope of the project
• Decompose the work and develop work packages
• Create a Work Breakdown Structure
• Develop a Critical Path Schedule
• Review types of cost estimates and identify whether they are “top down or bottom up”
• Review budgets, contingencies and reserves
• Calculate planned and earned values to compare with actual cost
• Perform a cost and schedule analysis
Each week you will prepare a key deliverable for the project plan based on a provided Case Study. These deliverables include:
• Project Scope Statement
• Project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and WBS dictionary
• Critical Path schedule sequence diagram
• Bar Chart Schedule (Gantt Chart)
• Project Cost Estimate
• Project Status using an Earned Value Calculation
All of this will position you to set up a plan to control your next assignment or your next project whether this is as the project manager or as an area leader.
Rice Center for Engineering Leadership is a Registered Education Provider through the Project Management Institute (PMI)®. Learners who complete this course on the Certificate track will be awarded 14 hours of Profession Development Units. These are recognized by PMI for continuing education or can be applied toward the 35 hours of education required for the Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification.
PMI and PMP are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

Impartido por:

Tom Phalen

Lecturer in Engineering Leadership, PMP

Kazimir Karwowski

Executive Director, PMP

Transcripción

So, what is a Work Breakdown Structure? Simply put, is a structured way the work will be done and to consider scheduling, contracts, and technical requirements. It provides a basis for future planning, budgets, and allows the tracking of performance and company objectives. So why is it work breakdown structure useful? It's used to create a list of tasks and defines the total scope in project, and represents the work specified in the current approved projects scope statement. It's easy to understand and decomposes a project into manageable components and categories, that uses a tiered hierarchy and identifies the terminal work package. It's the key starting point for project scheduling. It's required as part of the project's goal baseline, and it can either be activity or delivery oriented. Before you begin to create a work breakdown structure, you need to determine which type will work best for your project. The most common types are the top-down, which uses the organization's specific guidelines and uses work breakdown structure templates, or a bottom-up approach, which uses the subcomponents. This is a much more accurate process but takes more time. The work breakdown structure can be represented in a number of forms. Using phases of the project life cycle as the second level of decomposition with the product and project deliverables in the third level, using major deliverables as the second level of decomposition, and incorporating subcomponents that may be developed by organizations outside of the project team. Think of this as contracted work. There isn't one size that fits all solution to picking the right type for your project. This is going to be up to you, the project manager to choose the type that best fits your organization and the project. After you decide what type of work breakdown structure you're going to use, the next step in developing your WBS is to identify the level of specificity needed for your project. Determining the type of level of detail is very important to know before you start. Each of these formats has its strengths and weaknesses, and you'll have to decide which level and type is appropriate for your project. Once you decide the type to use, a useful method for creating a WBS as opposed to note method to help create the initial pass regardless of the level you choose. A few tips for creating a work breakdown structure is to remember that this is a list of tasks that will lead to the specific work packages which is the lowest level. And these include all of the work necessary to complete the project. You don't want your WBS to be too large, so you should limit it to between 100 and 200 work packages or deliverables. If you see this, you should break your project deliverables into smaller chunks. Try to use the 8/80 rule. For each person's workload, eight hours a day or 80 hours for a project. Use multiple layers. You can create three to four levels deep, depending on the complexity of the project, and consider how many work packages to include in each level and the number of work hours associated with each package. This is important because then you can estimate some of the costs associated with your project. If you plan on doing similar tasks during the project, create templates. Make sure you don't do more than five to nine jobs at one level, and jobs should be of similar complexity. And the plan should provide some sense of progress.